Lawrence Lessig is becoming the leading authority on the law of cyberspace. Greg Blonder and his patents live at GenuineIdeas.com.
Tim O'Reilly, the publisher and Internet pioneer, has posted this comment on Amazon's patents. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation has called for a boycott. As for Amazon: Jeff Bezos declined to comment on patent issues for this article, citing the pending litigation; but now he has released an "open letter" on the subject.

When
twenty-first-century
historians look back at the breakdown of the United States patent system, they will see a turning point in the case of Jeff Bezos
and Amazon.com and their special invention: "the patented 1-click feature," Bezos calls it.
Not everyone
who knows Bezos as the new-minted billionaire founder of the world's
leading Internet retailer knows that he's also an inventor, but he is. It
says so on U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411, "Method and System for Placing
a Purchase Order via a Communications Network." Every good invention
needs a story, and Jeff Bezos has one for one-click ordering. He's laying
it out in federal court, where already, at the height of the holiday
shopping season, he won an injunction forcing his chief competitor,
Barnesandnoble.com, to add deliberate complication to its ordering
process.
In ways that could not have been predicted even a few years ago,
the patent system is in crisis. A series of unplanned mutations have
transformed patents into a positive threat to the digital economy. The
patent office has grown entangled in philosophical confusion of its own
making; it has become a ferocious generator of litigation; and many
technologists believe that it has begun to choke the very innovation it
was meant to nourish.
The one-click story starts like this: A young man founds a company
called Amazon.com in the obligatory garage, with a bit of money raised
from his family. Soon his tiny crew begins selling books on line. Their
customers use a "shopping cart." Of course, there isn't a real
shopping cart, because the customers aren't really at
these stores, and there aren't really stores
at all. There is just a tiny picture of a shopping cart, and if you click
on it with the mouse, the screen displays a list of items you have
selected for purchase.

But the online shopper is thought to possess a thoroughly modern attention span, and many shopping carts are left abandoned in their virtual aisles.
So Bezos decides ("sometime prior to May of 1997,"
he says with the help of his lawyers) to offer a shortcut: let users
choose an item with just one click of the mouse button,
and use a shipping address and credit-card number already on file. Obvious? Sure, but among his employees some were naysayers, worried about spooking the customers. "Conventional wisdom was that they had to be slowly and incrementally led to the point of purchase," Bezos recalls. But his vision will not be denied. He
orders his software developers to "make it happen." And so they
do.
Amazon applies to the government for a trademark on the name
"1-Click" and a patent on the . . . well, on what, exactly? Not
the idea, because pure abstractions may not be patented. Not the program
code, because copyright law protects this. But Amazon received its patent
in September and instantly sued Barnes and Noble over its similar
"Express Lane." Amazon won an injunction in December forcing its
competitor to insert a superfluous mouse click. ("Please be sure to
click this button," Barnes and Noble begs plaintively. "If you
don't, we won't get your order!")
The one-click injunction capped a burst of skirmishing in 1999  the
start of what promises to become furious, wide-ranging courtroom warfare 
over who will control electronic commerce. As the year 2000 begins, few of
America's e-commerce leaders are not targets of patent litigation. The
battles to come will determine whether the essential tools and building
blocks will continue to spread rapidly through the community of software
designers and Internet pioneers, or whether they will be cordoned off as
the private property of particular companies. Amazon just got a new patent for a system of letting Web sites refer customers in exchange for commissions  its "affiliate" program. Sure enough, Barnes and Noble has a nearly identical affiliate program. So do thousands of other online merchants, now feverishly calling their lawyers yet again. Can Amazon really own this?
For better or worse, the
struggle will redefine our understanding of what an invention is, in our
complex, technocratic age.

Patents long served as a fundamental cog in the American machine,
cherished in our national soul. We are the land of Thomas Edison and the
Wright Brothers and Alexander Graham Bell, where Congress is empowered by
the Constitution to promote the Progress of
Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and
Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and
Discoveries. Hence the patent office, charged with the
enforcement of a Faustian bargain: inventors give up their secrets,
publishing them for all to see and absorb, and in exchange they get
20-year government-sanctioned monopolies on their technologies. This
arrangement fueled industrial progress in the early United States by
encouraging investment in research and rewarding inventors who published
their work rather than cloaking it in trade secrets.
Now, however, during the short span of the Internet
revolution, the patent system has begun to disintegrate by growing out of
control. The United States is issuing patents at a torrential pace,
establishing new records each year, and it is expanding the universe of
things that can be patented. Patents began in a world of machines and
chemical processes  a substantial, tangible, nuts-and-bolts world  but
now they have spread across a crucial boundary, into the realm of thought
and abstraction. Software and algorithms used to be unpatentable. Recent
court decisions and patent-office rule-making has made software the
fastest growing patent category, and companies are rushing to patent the
most basic methods of doing business. "This is a disaster," says
Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and cyberspace expert.
"This is a major change that occurred without anybody thinking
through the consequences. In my view, it is the single greatest threat to
innovation in cyberspace, and I'm extremely skeptical that anybody's going
to get it in time."
The litigation is spreading fast. Multi-Tech
Systems has just sued the three leading PC makers, Compaq, Dell and
Gateway, over patents on transmitting data over a communications line. A
St. Louis patent broker is suing Yahoo over a "method of effecting
commerce in a networked computer environment in a computerized
system"  that is, shopping on line. Another Internet startup,
Priceline.com, has patented its Internet version of an ancient auction
technique, the name-your-price "reverse" auction, and is suing
Microsoft's Expedia.com travel service. Microsoft, meanwhile, has
infuriated much of the Internet community by patenting a well-known
"style sheet" technology just as it was being adopted as
standard by the World Wide Web consortium.

The Patent That Never Was
Inventors rank high in our pantheon of heroes. If someone has a great idea that makes life a little better for millions of people, surely fortune and fame are fair compensation. Yet, when it comes to rewarding and protecting the greatest achievements, the history of twentieth-century invention suggests that the patent system has at best a mixed record. [To article.]

Sightsound.com is suing at least one music retailer and demanding
royalties from others over a patent on selling audio and video recordings
on line. A California software company is suing eBay over database
technology. Two professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
are suing the Ask Jeeves search site over two patents on handling
questions in natural language. A Boeing software engineer has patented a
basic method of correcting the century in dates stored in databases and
sent a threatening form letter to 700 of the nation's largest
corporations, demanding one-fourth of a percent of their total revenues,
on the assumption that they probably used the same method [see sidebar].
This is just the beginning. Patents marking off broad swaths
of electronic commerce will soon be pouring from the patent office,
unwelcome surprises to whole categories of new entrepreneurs. In the last
few months, companies have gotten patents for keeping calendars on the
World Wide Web, for downloading Web pages at regular intervals, for
storing documents in databases, for "real-time shopping," for
auctioning cars, for creating profiles of users; for search engines, for
payment systems, and for variations of every other fundamental gear and
lever in the theoretical machinery of on-line business. Just as insidiously, biotech companies are getting thousands of patents granting them rights to exploit particular pieces of the human genome  the DNA common to all of us.
For that matter, the most trivial slices of off-line life are
winning patent protection: for example, measuring breasts with a tape
to determine bra size; and executing a tennis stroke while wearing a knee
pad (U.S. 5,993,336: "The tennis racket is swung toward a tennis ball
so as to hit the tennis ball with the racket . . .") Many of these
patents are harmless. Most are narrower, when read carefully, than they
sound at first. Others are multimillion-dollar lawsuits in embryo. Every
week, hundreds of new data-processing patents are issued, and if you are
an entrepreneur with an e-commerce business plan, you will soon be
cross-checking it against these patents. Won't you be using a
"metering mechanism for distribution of electronic information"?
(Intel owns it.) "Tracking the purchase of a product and services
over the Internet"? (InfoSpace.com.) A "method and system for
constructing queries"? (Microsoft.) "Expanding web documents by
merging with linked documents"? (IBM.)
Each of these patents is a
tiny masterpiece of logic and disputation. Each represents, by definition,
a restraint on trade, a layer of regulation, expensive overhead in the
free-market economy. The exclusive rights conveyed by a patent automatically translate into higher prices for consumers somewhere along
the chain. The Supreme Court saw the downside more than a hundred years ago. "It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country," the Court wrote. "It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business." Patent lawyers and officials argue that each patent represents a good
idea and that good ideas deserve to be rewarded; but does every good idea
deserve a twenty-year government-sponsored monopoly?
"We like to say right to exploit," the Commissioner
of Patents and Trademarks, Q. Todd Dickinson, says cheerfully.